Developing Principled Frameworks 99

ll The need for authenticity

ll The need for student-centredness

More recently Ellis (2010) discusses how ‘second language acquisition (SLA) research
has informed language teaching materials’ (p. 33) with particular reference to the design
of tasks and Tomlinson (2010) develops thirty principles of materials development
from six principles of language acquisition and four principles of language teaching.
Tomlinson (2013) argues that second language acquisition is facilitated by:

ll A rich and meaningful exposure to language in use.

ll Affective and cognitive engagement.
ll Making use of those mental resources typically used in communication in
the L1.
ll Noticing how the L2 is used.
ll Being given opportunities for contextualized and purposeful communication
in the L2.
ll Being encouraged to interact.
ll Being allowed to focus on meaning.

He makes use of these principles to develop criteria for the development and evaluation
of materials and then makes use of these criteria to evaluate six currently used global
coursebooks. Similar principled evaluations are reported in Tomlinson et  al. (2001),
Masuhara et al. (2008) and Tomlinson and Masuhara (2013) and one conclusion made
by all of them is that coursebooks are not typically driven by principled frameworks but
by considerations of what is likely to sell.
What I am going to do in this chapter is to outline two frameworks for materials
development which aim to be principled, flexible and coherent, and which have
developed from my answers to the question about how we think people learn language.
One is text-driven and ideal for developing coursebooks and supplementary classroom
materials. The other is task-driven and ideal for localizing and personalizing classroom
materials, and for autonomous learning.

A text-driven approach to materials development

The framework
This is a framework which I have used on materials writing workshops in Argentina,
Botswana, Brazil, Japan, Malaysia, Mauritius, the Seychelles, Singapore and Vietnam
100 Developing Materials for Language Teaching

and on textbook projects in China, Ethiopia, Japan, Namibia, Oman, Singapore and
Turkey (e.g. Tomlinson, 2001b). In all those countries I found it helped writers (mainly
teachers with little previous experience of materials development) not only to write
principled and coherent materials quickly, effectively and consistently but also to
articulate and develop their own theories of language learning and language teaching
at the same time.
The framework follows the stages outlined below.

1 Text collection
You come across and/or create texts (written or spoken) with the potential for
engagement. By engagement, I mean a willing investment of energy and attention in
experiencing the text in such a way as to achieve interaction between the text and the
senses, feelings, views and intuitions of the reader/listener. Such texts can help the
reader/listener to achieve a personal multidimensional representation in which inner
speech, sensory images and affective stimuli combine to make the text meaningful
(Tomlinson, 1998d, 2000c, 2010, 2011, 2013). And sometimes they can help the reader/
listener to achieve the sort of aesthetic response described by Rosenblatt (1968, 1978)
in which ultimately the reader enters the text and lives in it.
Such a representation can achieve the affective impact and the deep processing
which can facilitate language acquisition. It can also help the learners to develop the
confidence and skills which can give them access to valuable input outside and after
their course (Tomlinson, 1999c, p. 62).
Such texts are those which first of all engage ourselves in the ways described above
and they can come, for example, from literature, from songs, from newspapers and
magazines, from non-fiction books, from radio and television programmes and from
films. Obviously, such texts cannot be easily found and certainly cannot be found
quickly in order to illustrate teaching points (as Bell and Gower (2011) found out when
they tried to find engaging, authentic texts to illustrate predetermined teaching points
in their intermediate-level coursebook). It is much easier and much more useful to
build up a library of potentially engaging texts and then to let the texts eventually
selected for target levels determine the teaching points. And it is obviously much more
effective to teach language features which have first been experienced by the learners
in engaging texts than to impose ‘unengaging’ texts on learners just because they
illustrate predetermined teaching points. This library development stage is ongoing
and context free. Its purpose is to create a resource with the potential for subsequent
matching to particular contexts of learning.

2 Text selection
In this stage you select from your library of potentially engaging texts (either one text
for a particular lesson or a number of texts for a set of materials or a textbook). As the
materials are going to be driven by the text(s) this stage is very important and should
 Developing Principled Frameworks 101

be criterion-referenced. Initially, it is a good idea to apply the criteria explicitly; but

eventually this can be done intuitively.
The criteria which I have found help to achieve effective selection are:

ll Does the text engage me cognitively and affectively?

ll Is the text likely to engage most of the target learners cognitively and
effectively?
ll Are the target learners likely to be able to connect the text to their lives?
ll Are the target learners likely to be able to connect the text to their
knowledge of the world?
ll Are most of the target learners likely to be able to achieve
multidimensional mental representation of the text?
ll Is the text likely to stimulate divergent personal responses from the target
learners?
ll Is the linguistic level of the text likely to present an achievable challenge to
the target learners?
ll Is the cognitive level of the text likely to present an achievable challenge to
the target learners?
ll Is the emotional level of the text suitable for the age and maturity of the
target learners?
ll Is the text likely to contribute to the personal development of the learners?
ll Does the text contribute to the ultimate exposure of the learners to a
range of genres (e.g. short stories, poems, novels, songs, newspaper
articles, brochures, advertisements, etc.)?
ll Does the text contribute to the ultimate exposure of the learners to a
range of text types (e.g. narrative, description, persuasion, information,
justification, etc.)?

I would rate each text on a 5-point scale and would not select any text which did not
achieve at least 4 on each of the criteria above.

Notes

1 Usefulness for teaching a particular language feature is a dangerous criterion

as this can tempt writers into the selection of texts which do not engage the
learners and which, therefore, do not help them to achieve durable learning of
the teaching point.
102 Developing Materials for Language Teaching

2 Obviously many of the texts on an ESP (English for Specific Purposes) or EAP
(English for Academic Purposes) course should relate to the target learners’
purposes for doing the course but if all the texts do this explicitly there is a
danger of tedium and, therefore, of lack of engagement. This is a lesson I
learned when a group of Saudi Arabian pilots complained that they were bored
with reading about aircraft and airports and, almost simultaneously, a group of
Iraqi diplomats complained that they were fed up with reading about politics
and diplomacy. Both groups then responded very enthusiastically to the
inclusion of poetry on their courses. The important point is that affect is vital
for learning, even on courses with very specific purposes (Tomlinson, 1999a).
Without it there is a danger that language learning ‘can reduce the learner from
an individual human being with views, attitudes and emotions to a language
learner whose brain is focused narrowly on the low level linguistic de-coding
which . . . prevents the learner from achieving multidimensional representation
of the L2 world’ (Tomlinson, 1998a, p. 20). This means that the learners are not
using their whole minds, that a multiplicity of neural connections are not being
fired and that meaningful and durable learning is not taking place.

3 While it is important to expose learners to a range of genres they are likely

to encounter outside and after their course, I have found that the best way to
achieve affective engagement is to include literature. By this I do not mean
the classics of the literary canon but rather well-written texts which narrate,
describe, argue or evoke in ways which encourage the reader to respond in
personal and multidimensional ways, and which leave gaps for the reader to
fill in (Saraceni in this volume; Tomlinson, 1994a, 1998b, 2000a, 2001a). Ideally
these texts (especially for lower levels) are linguistically simple but cognitively
and emotionally complex (see the example below).

4 It is very rare that a text engages all the learners in a class. What we are
aiming at is engaging most of them in a given class and all of them over a
course. The best way I have found of achieving this is to make sure that many
(but not all) of the texts relate to the basic universal themes of birth, growing
up, going to school, starting a career, falling in love, getting married and dying
(though this is a taboo topic in some countries).

3 Text experience
In this stage you experience the selected text again. That is, you read or listen to it again
experientially in order to re-engage with the text. You then reflect on your experience
and try to work out what was happening in your mind during it. This re-engagement and
reflection is essential so that you can design activities which help the target learners
to achieve similar engagement. Without this stage there is a danger that you study the
text as a sample of language and end up designing activities which focus the learners
on linguistic features of the text. Of course, if you fail to re-engage with the text you
should reconsider your decision to select it to drive your materials.
 Developing Principled Frameworks 103

4 Readiness activities
As soon as you have re-engaged with the text, you start to devise activities which
could help the learners to experience the text in similar multidimensional ways. First
of all, you devise readiness activities which get the learners ready for the reading
experience. You are aiming at helping the learners to achieve the mental readiness
which readers take to L1 texts and to inhibit the word fixation and apprehension which
L2 readers typically take to texts (Tomlinson, 2000b). ‘The activities aim to stimulate
mental activity relevant to the content of the text by activating connections, by
arousing attention, by generating relevant visual images and by getting the learner to
use inner speech to discuss relevant topics with themselves. What is important is that
all the learners open and activate their minds not that they answer questions correctly’
(Tomlinson, 1999c, p. 63). These activities are different from ‘warmers’ in that they are
not necessarily getting the learners to talk but are aiming primarily to get the learners
to think. They could ask the learners to visualize, to draw, to think of connections, to
mime, to articulate their views, to recount episodes from their lives, to share their
knowledge, to make predictions: anything which gets them to activate connections in
their minds which will help them when they start to experience the text.
For example, if the text is about an embarrassing moment, they can be asked to
visualize embarrassing moments in their own lives to help them to empathize with
the sufferer in the text. If the text is about tourists, they can be asked to think about
and then act out in groups typical tourist scenarios in their region. If the text is about a
child’s first day at school they can be asked to think about and then share with a partner
their first day at school. And, because the activities aim at mental readiness rather
than language practice, any activity involving talking to others can be done in the L1 in
monolingual lower-level groups.
The important point is that the lesson starts in the learners’ minds and not in the
text and that the activities help the learners to gain a personal experience of the text
which connects it to their lives.

5 Experiential activities
These are activities which are designed to help the learners to represent the text
in their minds as they read it or listen to it and to do so in multidimensional ways
which facilitate personal engagement. They are things they are encouraged to do while
reading or listening and should therefore be mental activities which contribute to the
representation of the text and which do not interrupt the processing of it nor add
difficulty or complexity to the task. They could include, for example, trying to visualize
a politician as they read about him, using inner speech to give their responses to
provocative points in a text, trying to follow a description of a journey on a mental map
or thinking of examples from their own lives to illustrate or contradict points made in
a text. The activities should not involve writing answers to questions nor discussing
things in pairs or groups, as this can interrupt the experience and make representation
104 Developing Materials for Language Teaching

more difficult. These activities need to be given to the learners just before they start to
read or listen to the text and should be given through concise and simple instructions
which are easy to remember and apply. For example:

You’re going to listen to a poem about a child’s first day at school. Imagine that you
are that child and that you are standing alone in the playground at the beginning of
your first day at school. As you listen to the poem, try to see in your mind what the
child could see in the playground.

Experiential activities can be either related to a given text, as in the example above, or
they can be part of a process approach which involves the learners in participating in
the creation of the text, as in the examples below:

ll The teacher reads aloud a text and pauses at salient points while learners
shout out predictions of the next word or phrase.
ll The teacher dictates a text and then pauses at salient points while learners
compare what they have written with their partners and then write the
next line (an approach which can be particularly effective with poetry).
ll The teacher reads aloud a text while the learners act it out (an approach
which can be particularly effective if each group of learners plays a different
character in a story together).
ll The teacher reads aloud most of a text and then gets groups of learners to
write their own endings.
ll The teacher gives the learners draft texts on which an ‘editor’ has written
suggested changes in the wording and then gets them to write out a final
version of their own.

6  Intake response activities

These are activities which help the learners to develop and articulate what they have
taken in from the text. They focus on the mental representation which the learners have
achieved from their initial reading of the text and they invite the learners to reflect on
this representation rather than return to the text. Unlike conventional comprehension
questions, these activities do not test learners on their comprehension of the text.
Instead they give the learners a positive start to their post-reading/listening responses
by inviting them to share with others what the text means to them. They cannot be
wrong because they are not being asked about the text but about their personal
representation of it. However, it is possible that their representation is only partial (or
even superficial) and the process of sharing of it with others can help to extend and
deepen it. Intake response activities could ask the learners to think about and then
articulate their feelings and opinions about what was said or done in the text.
 Developing Principled Frameworks 105

They could ask them to visualize, to draw or to mime what they can remember from
the text. Or they could ask them to summarize the text to someone who has not read
it or to ask clarification questions of the teacher or of someone else who knows the
text well.
These activities should not be graded or criticized but the teacher can help the
learners to deepen their initial responses by asking questions, by guiding them to think
back to particular sections of the text or by ‘feeding’ them extracts from the text to
stimulate further thought and discussion.

7  Development activities
‘These are activities which provide opportunities for meaningful language production
based on the learners’ representations of the text’ (Tomlinson, 1999c, p. 63). They involve
the learners (usually in pairs or small groups) going back to the text before going forward
to produce something new. So, for example, after experiencing a story called ‘Sentence
of Death’ about a man in Liverpool being told that he has four hours to live, the learners
in groups rewrite the story so that it is based in their own town. Or, after experiencing
a story called, ‘They Came from the Sea: Part 1’, they sit in a circle and take it in turns
to suggest the next sentence of ‘They Came from the Sea: Part 2’. Or, after working out
from an advertisement the good and bad points of a vehicle called the C5, they design
an improved C6 and then write an advertisement. The point is that they can base their
language production both on what they have already understood from the text and on
connections with their own lives. While talking or writing they will gain opportunities
to learn new language and develop new skills and, if they are affectively engaged in an
achievable challenge, they will learn a lot from each other and from the teacher (if she/he
moves around the room helping learners when they ask for assistance).

8  Input response activities

These are activities which take the learners back to the text and which involve them in
studial reading or listening tasks aimed at helping them to make discoveries about the
purposes and language of the text.

Interpretation tasks
These are input response tasks which involve the learners thinking more deeply about
the text in order to make discoveries about the author’s intentions in creating it. They
are aimed at helping learners to develop critical and creative thinking skills in the target
language and they make use of such task types as:

ll Deep questions (e.g. What points about society do you think the writer is
making in his modern version of Little Red Riding Hood?)
ll Debates about issues in the text
106 Developing Materials for Language Teaching

ll Critical reviews of the text for a journal

ll Interviews with the characters
ll Interviews with the author

Awareness tasks
These are input response activities which provide opportunities for the learners to
gain awareness from a focused study of the text (by awareness I mean a gradually
developing apprehension which is different from knowledge in that it is internal,
personal, dynamic and variable). The awareness could be of language use (Bolitho and
Tomlinson, 1995, 2005), of communication strategies (Tomlinson, 1994b), of discourse
features, of genre characteristics or of text-type features. The awareness tasks usually
involve investigation of a particular feature of a text plus ‘research’ involving checking
the typicality of the investigated feature by analysing the same feature in use in other,
equivalent texts. So, for example, you could ask the learners to work out generalizations
about the form and function of ‘in case of’ from the poem by Roger McGough called
‘In Case of Fire’, and then get the learners to find and compare examples of ‘in case of’
in notices and instruction manuals. Or you could ask learners to make generalizations
about a character’s use of the imperative when talking to his father in a scene from
a novel; or ask them to work out typical features of the genre of advertisement from
examining a number of advertisements in a magazine. The important point is that
evidence is provided in a text which the learners have already experienced holistically
and then they are helped to make focused discoveries through discrete attention to a
specified feature of the text. That way they invest cognitive and affective energy and
attention in the learning process and they are likely to increase their readiness for
acquisition (Pienemann, 1985; Tomlinson, 1994b, 2013).
When I use this framework I often get learners to revise the product of the
development activity making use of the discoveries they have made as a result of
the awareness activity. For example, learners could revise the advertisement they
have designed for their C6 after making discoveries about the language and strategies
of advertisements from an analysis of the authentic advertisement for the C5 (and
possibly other vehicle advertisements too).

Using the framework

The above framework is best used flexibly. Obviously some stages must precede
others (e.g. readiness activities before experiential activities) and there are strong
arguments for some stages preceding others (e.g. intake response before input
response so that the learners progress positively from what they already understand
to what they need to think more carefully about). However, there is no need to follow
all the stages in the framework (it depends on the engagement and the needs and
wants of each particular class, as well as the focus of the core text), the sequence of
 Developing Principled Frameworks 107

some of the stages can vary (e.g. the development activities can come before or after
the input response activities) and sometimes the teacher might decide to focus on a
particular type of activity because of the needs of the learners (e.g. after a brief intake
response activity the teacher might spend the rest of the lesson on a genre awareness
activity because the particular genre exemplified by the text (e.g. scientific report) is a
new and important one for the particular class). It is useful, though, for the materials
developer to include all the stages in the actual course materials so that the teachers
(and possibly the learners) can make decisions for themselves about which stages
to use and what sequence to use them in. The important point is that apprehension
should come before comprehension (Kolb, 1984) and that the learners are encouraged
to respond holistically, affectively and multidimensionally to a text before being helped
to think more deeply about it in order to learn something explicitly from it.
By using the framework as a guide you can very quickly develop principled and
engaging materials either for a particular class or for a course of materials. I have used
it myself to prepare cover lessons at 5 minutes’ notice and I have used it in Belgium,
Japan, Luxembourg, Singapore, Turkey and Vietnam to help teachers to produce an
effective unit of material in just 15 minutes.

An example of the framework in use

Here is an example of a text-driven framework used to produce the materials for a
90-minute lesson:

‘I’m an old, old lady’

1 Tell the learners to think of an old woman they know. Tell them to try to see
pictures of their old woman in their minds, to see where she is, to see what
she is doing, to see what she is wearing. Tell them to talk to themselves about
their feelings towards the old woman.

2 Tell the learners to form pairs and to tell each other about their old woman. Tell
them to describe the pictures of their old woman in their mind and to express
their feelings about her.

3 Tell the learners you are going to read them a poem about an old woman and
that, as they listen, they should change the pictures in their minds from their
old woman to the woman in the poem. They should also talk to themselves
about their feelings towards the old lady in the poem.

4 Read the poem below to the learners:

I’m an old, old lady

And I don’t have long to live.
I am only strong enough to take
108 Developing Materials for Language Teaching

Not to give. No time left to give.

I want to drink, I want to eat,
I want my shoes taken off my feet
I want to talk but not to walk
Because if I walk, I have to know
Where it is I want to go.
I want to sleep but not to dream
I want to play and win every game
To live with love but not to love
The world to move but me not move
I want I want for ever and ever
The world to work, the world to be clever.
Leave me be, but don’t leave me alone.
That’s what I want. I’m a big round stone
Sitting in the middle of a thunderstorm.
There you are: that’s true.
That’s me. Now: you.
John Arden, ‘Phineus’, from the The Happy Haven

5 Tell the learners to think back over the poem, to see pictures of the old lady in
their minds and decide what they think about her.

6 Tell the learners to get into groups and discuss their responses to the following
statement about the old lady in the poem: I don’t like this lady. She’s very
selfish.

7 Give the learners the poem and three pictures of very different old ladies.
Then tell them to decide in their groups which of the old ladies wrote the
poem.

8 Get each group to join with another group and discuss their answers to 6 and 7
above.

9 Tell the learners to do one of the following, either individually, in pairs or in

small groups:
●● Learn to recite the poem in the voice of the old lady.
●● Paint a picture of the poem.
●● You are the old lady. Write a letter to your son in Australia.
●● You are the old lady. Write your diary for today.
●● The old lady goes to the park and meets an old man on a park bench. Write
the conversation between them.
●● You are the old lady’s family. Hold a meeting to decide how you can help
her.
 Developing Principled Frameworks 109

10 Get the students in groups to discuss the following questions:

●● What do you think the old lady means when she says, ‘I’m a big round
stone/Sitting in the middle of a thunderstorm’?
●● How do you think old ladies that you know are similar to or different from
the lady in the poem?
●● What similarities and differences do you think the poem illustrates
between your own culture and British culture?

11 At the end of the poem the old lady says:

There you are: that’s true.

That’s me. Now: you.

Get the learners to write a short poem about themselves beginning I’m a . . .

12 Get the learners to do the following:

i What tense does the old lady use throughout her poem. Why do you think
she uses this tense? Find examples from other texts of this tense being
used with this function.

ii The old lady uses a number of imperatives.

●● List all the imperatives in the poem.
●● Write a generalization about the form of the imperative as illustrated by
the examples in the poem.
●● Write a generalization about the function of the imperatives which the
old lady uses in the poem.
●● Find examples from other texts of the imperative being used with the
same function as it is in the poem.

13 Invite the learners to improve their poems in 11 by making use of their

discoveries in 12.

There are a lot of activities in the example above, Obviously the teacher would not be
obliged to use all of them. It would depend on the ability and the engagement of the
class and principled choices could be made from the menu of activities by the teacher
and/or by the learners themselves. The activities however are designed and sequenced
to follow a framework based on principles of language acquisition and this principled
coherence should not be disturbed (Table 4.1).
110 Developing Materials for Language Teaching

Table 4.1  Recommended stages for a text-driven approach

Stages Learner activities Principles

1  Readiness activities Thinking about something 1  Personal connection.

personal which will help the 2  Visual imaging.
learners to connect with the 3  Use of inner speech.
content of the core text.

2  Experiential activities Linking the images and 1  Personal connection.

thoughts from the readiness 2  Visual imaging.
activities to the text when 3  Use of inner speech.
first experiencing it. 4 Affective and cognitive
engagement.
5  Use of high-level skills.
6  Focus on meaning.

3 Intake response Developing and then 1  Personal connection.

activities articulating personal 2  Visual imaging.
responses to the text. 3 Affective and cognitive
engagement.
4  Use of inner speech.
5  Interaction.

4  Development activity 1 Developing the text by 1  Personal connection.

continuing it, relocating it, 2  Visual imaging.
changing the writer’s views, 3  Use of inner speech.
personalizing it, responding 4 Affective and cognitive
to it etc. engagement.
5  Use of high-level skills.
6  Focus on meaning.
7  Interaction.
8 Purposeful
communication.

5  Input response activity Focusing on a specific 1  Personal connection.

linguistic, pragmatic, 2  Visual imaging.
discourse, genre or cultural 3  Use of inner speech.
feature of the text in order 4 Affective and cognitive
to make discoveries about engagement.
its use. 5 Use of high-level skills.
6 Interaction.
7 Noticing.

6  Development activity 2 Revising the first draft from 4 As for 4.

above making use of their
discoveries in 5 above.

Adapted from Tomlinson, 2013, p. 24.